Beware the ghost of slippery Harold: David Cameron's European referendum speech was hailed as a masterstroke, but we've been here before

As the past few days have reminded us, political leadership is all too often an exercise in smoke and mirrors.

For years, David Cameron's activists have been badgering him to call a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.

On Wednesday, at long last, they got what they wanted, with Mr Cameron pledging to call an in-out referendum by 2017 after renegotiating the terms of British membership.

By any standards, his long-awaited speech was a masterful performance: clever, assured and plausible. For once, even the Prime Minister's critics hailed him as statesmanlike and decisive; by contrast, his Labour and Lib Dem rivals looked bewildered, confused and weak.

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David Cameron now finds himself in a similar position to Harold Wilson's after pledging an EU referendum

But when you look more closely at the fine print of Mr Cameron's words, the doubts begin to grow.

The Eurosceptics may have begun cracking open the champagne, but I suspect they would be very premature to drink it.

At best, the referendum is four years away. What is more, Mr Cameron will get the chance to call it only if he wins the next General Election, which - given the wretched state of the economy and the Tories' poor standing in the polls - looks uncertain, to say the least.

Even if Mr Cameron does get the chance to renegotiate Britain's membership, will he really achieve a worthwhile settlement?

The signals from Europe are hardly encouraging. Already, Germany's Foreign Minister has insisted 'cherry picking is not an option'.

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Meanwhile, his French counterpart,
living up to his national reputation for haughty condescension, chose
'an example which our British friends will understand'.

'Let's imagine Europe is a football
club,' said Laurent Fabius. 'You join, but once you're in it you can't
say "let's play rugby".'

Given the attitude of the French and the Germans, I suspect the best Mr Cameron can hope for is a slight reduction in Britain's EU contributions and an opt-out - though probably only temporary - from certain new Brussels regulations.

The fundamental basis of our membership would remain untouched, while the European 'project', as its devotees insist on calling it, would continue undisturbed towards political and fiscal union.

For Mr Cameron, though, that would probably be enough. I can picture him now, returning in triumph from a late-night showdown in, say, Luxembourg, waving the piece of paper that supposedly guarantees a brighter future for Britain in Europe.

Uncanny: Then, as now, the referendum was the pet project of a Prime Minister desperately hoping to keep his Eurosceptic party together while still keeping Britain on board the European wagon

If that happened, the pro-European
lobby would crank into gear, the Prime Minister would take his place
beside the Labour and Lib Dem leaders in the Yes campaign, and the
public would almost certainly troop to the polls to reaffirm Britain's
place in the EU.

How, you may wonder, can I be so sure? The answer is that we have been here before.

This was almost exactly what happened in June 1975, in the very first referendum in our history. Back then, the British people were asked to decide whether we should stay in the Common Market, which we had joined two years earlier.

Then, as now, the referendum was the pet
project of a Prime Minister desperately hoping to keep his Eurosceptic
party together while still keeping Britain on board the European wagon.

In 1975, the man in question was Labour's Harold Wilson. He and Mr Cameron might seem very strange bedfellows: after all, one was Labour, the other is Conservative, with Wilson having been the state-educated son of a works chemist from Huddersfield.

Indeed, when people compare Mr Cameron to a Seventies Prime Minister, they usually pick out Wilson's bitter rival Edward Heath, the organ-playing, ocean-racing, U-turning Tory leader who took us into Europe in the first place.

For my money, though, the Wilson-Cameron parallels are so compelling as to be irresistible. And the last European referendum offers some disheartening hints of what could happen in four years' time.

In 1975, the Government boasted that it had substantially renegotiated the terms of Britain's EU membership.

When people compare Mr Cameron to a Seventies Prime Minister, they usually pick out Wilson's bitter rival Edward Heath. For my money, though, the Wilson-Cameron parallels are so compelling as to be irresistible

But as historians universally agree, the renegotiation was effectively an enormous - and enormously hollow - exercise in political spin.

Even at the time, the emphasis on public relations was hardly surprising, for like his modern-day counterpart, Harold Wilson was a master of slick presentation.

Like Mr Cameron, Wilson had been chosen by his party as a smooth, television-friendly moderniser after they had lost three successive elections. And, like Mr Cameron, he seemed set fair for a thumping victory - but then almost threw it away, scraping home in 1964 by just four seats.

To his enemies, Wilson seemed shifty and
duplicitous. He talked a good game, but never delivered. 'There are
only two things I dislike about Harold Wilson,' ran a memorable joke of
the day. 'His face!'

Like Mr Cameron, Wilson was a master of ambiguity

But Wilson had one great asset, which I suspect our current Prime Minister shares: he was a brilliantly ruthless tactician.

Against all the odds, he always managed to keep his disputatious party together, and even when he had been written off, he always managed to cling onto the Labour leadership.

In the Sixties and Seventies, it looked as if Europe would tear Wilson's party apart. The Labour Left were dead against the Common Market, seeing it as a capitalist plot; the moderates, meanwhile, were almost fanatically pro-European.

Like Mr Cameron, Wilson was a master of ambiguity. At first he was opposed to the Common Market. Then he launched a half-hearted bid to join, which was promptly vetoed by the French president, Charles de Gaulle.

Again, Wilson changed horses: when the Tories took us into Europe in 1973, he was jeering from the sidelines. By this time, though, he had committed himself to a referendum - a classic bit of legerdemain from a politician who loved to have his cake and eat it.

When Wilson returned to office a year later, his handling of the referendum might have been a dry run for David Cameron.

Like Mr Cameron, he was now basically in favour of Britain staying in Europe - and with good reason. Most people welcomed the idea of a common market, and given that Britain's economy was in deep water, with inflation having hit 26 per cent, Europe looked like a lifeboat to prosperity.

But Wilson had no intention of risking his grip on the party leadership by nailing his colours to the mast. Instead, he used the issue of 'renegotiating the terms' to keep his divided party together and woo the public.

Ted Heath, he gravely told the nation, had been sold a pup. But he, Wilson, would get a much better deal.

It was, of course, all a con.

Clever: Wilson had no intention of risking his grip on the party leadership by nailing his colours to the mast

In Europe, most people treated Wilson's efforts with ridicule. One French cartoon showed him playing petanque with the French and German leaders, changing the rules as he goes along, and finally storming off in a huff.

Another typically graphic Gallic cartoon pictured Wilson in bed with a naked European woman. Positioned between her thighs, he gazes plaintively into her eyes. 'Get in or get out, my dear Wilson,' she says wearily. 'But do stop all this ridiculous coming and going.'

In fact, Wilson had no intention of getting out. And the renegotiation talks were merely a PR exercise, as his ministers soon discovered. When Wilson's Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, went off to Brussels to discuss the new terms, he found himself in a scene that resembled something from a satirist's nightmare.

Instead of radically rethinking the direction of the European enterprise, Callaghan was reduced to haggling over 'import levels of apricot halves' and the precise distinction between 'mutton and lamb'. He felt, he said later, more like a 'multiple grocer' than an international statesman.

For Callaghan, the low point came when 'nine Foreign Ministers from the major countries of Europe solemnly assembled in Brussels to spend several hours discussing how to resolve our differences on standardising a fixed position of rear-view mirrors on agricultural tractors'.

Renegotiation: Margaret Thatcher had to use all her reserves of stubbornness to get a rebate on Britain's exorbitant budget contributions

Embarrassed, he wondered what the great Foreign Secretaries of the past, 'Lord Palmerston, Lord Salisbury or Ernest Bevin, would have made of it'.

By the spring of 1975, Europe's leaders had cooked up a deal. Most of the details were almost comically obscure, from better terms for Commonwealth sugar producers, to improved British access to New Zealand lamb.

Even one of the Foreign Office's top officials - usually so pro-European - admitted that the talks had 'never produced any financial results'.

Nobody would have known it, though,
from Wilson's account. His efforts, he grandly told the Cabinet, had put
Brussels back under 'the political direction of the Governments of
member states', and had stopped Europe from 'developing in a federalist
direction. As long as we remained members we could prevent it developing
in that way'.

As we know
now, this was nonsense. If Britain had joined in the Fifties, when the
Common Market was founded, we might have been able to steer it in a
non-federalist direction.

But by 1975 it was too late. The federalist escalator was up and running and Britain was swept along with it.

In the meantime, Wilson and his colleagues persuaded the British people to back them in the first referendum in our history. Thanks to donations from big business, the pro-European camp had a war chest ten times greater than the sceptics.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the electorate voted for Europe by a two-to-one margin. At the time, the result seemed to vindicate Wilson's tactical cleverness. 'He has held the party together and put us in a position to stay in the Market,' one of his aides wrote in his diary. 'Nobody else could have done that.'

Today, the Prime Minister's cheerleaders are saying much the same thing about him, too. But I wonder whether David Cameron really wants to go down in history as the Conservatives' answer to Harold Wilson.

Though Wilson kept us in Europe, his renegotiation achieved precisely nothing. Less than a decade later, Margaret Thatcher had to use all her reserves of stubbornness to get a rebate on Britain's exorbitant budget contributions.

Ever since, the story of the EU has been one step after another towards ever-closer union, with Britain left grumbling in the rear.

David Cameron should be setting his sights higher. Yes, he has temporarily routed his critics, united his party and put Labour on the back foot.

But his much-vaunted 'new settlement' is unlikely to change things, not least since our European partners seem so reluctant to compromise.

The truth is that we are no closer now to knowing our international future and certainly no closer to a lasting settlement that coaxes the EU towards a looser, more flexible trading bloc, rather than a bloated federalist bureaucracy.

At the very least, Mr Cameron should surely not be taking political lessons from Harold Wilson. For today, the Labour Prime Minister is remembered not as a great statesman whose cunning kept us in Europe, but as a slippery political fixer who postponed tough decisions and presided over a Britain growing shabbier by the day.

My fear, though, is that, as Mr Cameron continues to play the Tory Right and his Lib Dem allies off against one another, the parallels between the two men will become ever more striking.

The Prime Minister may not have his predecessor's taste in Gannex raincoats, his fondness for the brandy bottle or, indeed, his common touch. Like Mr Wilson, though, he appears a smooth and clever man, with a talent for wrong-footing his enemies and, rather more worryingly, a distinct fondness for short-term tactics over long-term strategy.

Still, I sincerely hope I am wrong. In the second decade of the 21st century, with Britain facing dreadful economic challenges at home and extraordinary turmoil abroad, the last thing we need is a second Harold Wilson.